Do the math!

Explaining why some read a lot
and others read very little

By Jim Trelease © 2007

t's a fact: some people—including highly educated ones—read very little, and some — including those with or without higher education — read a great deal. Why?

Since we know that those who read the most, read the best, if we could find the answer to that question we might find clues to solving some student reading woes.

What is it that prevents some students from reading outside school? Is it the same thing that prevents adults from reading in their free time?

Wilbur Schramm

The answer may very well lie in the work of a man named Wilbur Schramm (1907-1987), the founder of mass communication as a science. I must confess to discovering Schramm's work only recently and am chagrined that it is not included in every edition of The Read-Aloud Handbook. Schramm's research had led him at one point to explain why some people read certain items in a newspaper or magazine and not other items. Exploring why we read what we read, he created a formula he called the Fraction of Selection. As I read it, it was as though I'd had a sudden epiphany. Here was a simple explanation of human reading behavior that is largely unknown and unexplored by professors and reading teachers, to say nothing of Secretaries of Education. It also helps us understand some of the nation's reading woes and what we can do about them.

First, a quick math review for those of you who have spent a little too much time reading and not enough time doing math. In the equation on the right, the Quotient, arrived at by dividing the Dividend by the Divisor. Increase the Dividend and you increase the Quotient. Conversely, increase the Divisor and you lower the Quotient.

In Schramm's Fraction of Selection, the Dividend consists of all the Rewards we expect to receive from something we do; The Divisor is whatever Effort or Difficulty we might have to endure to get the Reward. And the Quotient is the Frequency --that is, how often we end up doing this action. Thus, if there's a restaurant where you'll get a great meal but it' a 200-mile drive and the price is high, chances are that you don't eat there frequently. On the other hand, if it's not too far away and not too expensive, you'll eat there a lot more often. That's how the fraction of selection works.

Now let's apply all of this to reading.

 

REWARDS      Pleasure   Escape Information Prestige Salary

We'll start with the Dividend—the rewards that some people might expect from reading: Pleasure is right at the top but it includes various subcategories of pleasure. For example, some people enjoy reading anything they can escape into, others find satisfaction in gathering information, some expect pleasure from the grades or diplomas they'll earn from the reading, the prestige they'll have with peers in class, book club members they meet with every month or a boss or teacher they want to impress; and for some it's the pleasure that comes with higher pay scales associated with those diplomas they earned with the reading. Different people expect different rewards —or NO rewards—from reading. But anyone who reads expects to get something out of it.

Now to the Divisor —that is, the Difficulties or Effort Required for reading:

DIFFICULTIES      Distractions Lack of print Lack of time Disabilities Negative peers Noise level

• Distractions are a major problem in some homes—too many TV 's, DVD's, phones, video games; or just the general state of chaos in the home or school;
• For others there's a lack of print—no newspapers, magazines, or books to read. This is most true in poverty situations;
• For some folks it's a lack of time—working too many hours, raising too many kids, rushing to too many games or malls, or too much homework;
• For some people it's a case of not being able to read easily; they're plagued by learning disabilities or decoding woes;
• Other people are surrounded by family or peers who have negative attitudes toward school and reading. "Hey! Nicky -- get your head out of the book and get in here and watch TV with us! Who you tryin' to impress with the readin'?"
• And finally there can be a lack of quiet space; they're surrounded by too much noise at home or too many tests and demands in the classroom.

A perfect example of how the number of distractions impedes the amount of reading in a culture can be found here at Distractions, where I describe the decline in reading among citizens in the country which has long led the world in per-capita readership of books, magazines, and newspapers — Japan.

ll of these factors are going to determine how often someone actually reads. Where you maintain strong REWARD factors and lower the EFFORT factors, the stronger will be the frequency of reading. And the higher that number is for students, the higher will be their chances of success in school. Those who read the most, read the best.

Since most of the damaging factors occur in homes — where students spend the bulk of their time — we sure could use a national awareness campaign to eliminate as many of those damaging EFFORT factors as possible. Just think: if we did it with smoking, we can do it with reading. Forty years ago, every other adult in America was a daily smoker. Today, only one in four is. Wouldn't it be something to see a similar public awareness campaign created to instill a love of reading in every home? Wilbur Schramm's Fraction of Selection shows us what we need to work on — what needs to be improved and what needs to be eliminated. As you'll see below, some of the best-placed people to carry this struggle forward have given up the struggle.

One of Schramm's successors in the field, Clifford Nass, a professor of communication at Stanford University and director of the university's Communication between Humans and Interactive Media (CHIMe) lab, recently completed a study on the impact of interactive media on student achievement. His public radio interview on the findings can be heard at KQED-Interview.

An explanation of the Fraction of Selection concept is now available online here as a free brochure, one of a series produced by Jim Trelease in retirement. A video explanation of the Fraction of Selection concept can be found on my DVD, as well as in a Flash video online here at FILM. Author's note: I am embarrassed to write that, due to my own ignorance, the above information is not included in any of the editions of The Read-Aloud Handbook. Only in 2007, while surfing the Web for another item, did I discover Wilbur Schramm's theory. One of the blessings of the Web is that it allows authors and educators to add to their original manuscripts and at least partially correct their mistakes. Thus it's here.

 

". . . the fact is, people don't read anymore." On Jan. 15, 2008, at the opening of the annual Macworld Conference in San Francisco, Steve Jobs was being interviewed by several reporters when he made a startling observation. As reported the next day by John Markoff of The New York Times: Steve Jobs   "Today he [Jobs] had a wide range of observations on the industry, including the Amazon Kindle book reader, which he said would go nowhere largely because Americans have stopped reading. “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.” The question is: Was Jobs as right about that as he was about the iPod, the iPhone, and Pixar or did he know something the rest of us didn't know? No, not about reading but about one of his Web rivals , Amazon, and what it had in the works for book-reading. First, let's address his "people don't read anymore" remark. I probably rank among the Top Ten Apple product enthusiasts but on this one I've got to believe Steve has been spending a little too much time at the office in Cupertino. Or maybe he's speaking for himself, assuming that since the world revolves around his Apple anyway and he doesn't read anymore then . . . I can't think of a bookstore in the Bay Area or Silicon Valley that hasn't been busy whenever I've visited them in the last five years (including Hicklebee's in San Jose, one of the best and busiest children's book stores in America). If nobody reads, what are all those people in the stores for —the lattés? What's Amazon up to with the book thing? Was Oprah involved in one of the great hoaxes of all time? All those families standing in line all those late summer nights, waiting for the next Harry Potter book, was that some kind of charade? If Wilbur Schramm's "fraction of selection" (above) can be applied to reading, then the number of distractions in your life would correlate to the amount of reading you do. That being said, perhaps Steve is speaking out of guilt: few men have offered the world as many handsome and mesmerizing distractions in the last decade as he has in the iMac, iPod, and iPhone. Imagine if that creative head were turned toward making the world a more literate place. Read on.     Aw, just kidding! Meanwhile, back at the Cupertino ranch, Jobs' team of geniuses was busy working on their own version of the Kindle — in fact, they'd been working on it for almost a decade! Almost two years to the week after his "nobody reads" remark, Jobs unveiled the Apple version of the Kindle — the "iPad," describing it variously as "magical," "awesome," and "revolutionary." Jobs had only recently returned from a 6-month health-related sabbatical during which he must have done a lot of reading and changed his mind, right? Sure.

 

 More on Schramm's Fraction of Selection

 

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